Mixed Race Studies

Revealed: MP’s alleged killer ‘bought manual on how to make a handgun and bombs from a US far-right group and has links to neo-Nazi organisations going back decades’

The Daily Mail
London, England
2016-06-17

James Tozer, Chris Greenwood, Andy Dolan, and Claire Duffin For The Daily Mail
Richard Spillett, Stephanie Linning, and Lucy Crossley for MailOnline

• Detectives were last night questioning Thomas Mair over Jo Cox’s murder
• US civil rights group say their records show he bought far-Right books
• Claims the quiet loner had been recently released from psychiatric care
• Mair was brought up by his grandmother and lived in his childhood home
• Half-brother says Mair never expressed any ‘racist tendencies’, adding: ‘I’m mixed race and I’m his half-brother. We got on well’

The man suspected of killing Labour MP Jo Cox previously bought a book on how to make a handgun, it was claimed this morning.

Thomas Mair has been described as a loner who was ‘socially isolated and disconnected from society’ as a result of long-term mental illness.

Detectives were last night questioning 52-year-old Thomas Mair, amid fears he was motivated by Mrs Cox’s political campaigning.

Documents obtained from a US far-right group show a 1999 receipt for a manual on how to build a homemade gun with Mr Mair’s name and address on the top…

…Duane St Louis, age 41, the suspect’s half-brother and Mary’s son with second husband Reginald St Louis, said Mair had obsessive compulsive disorder and cleaned himself with Brillo pads because he was ‘obsessed with his personal hygiene’.

Reginald, who is believed to be from Grenada, and Mary had married when Mair was around 16. The couple lived with Duane and Mair’s younger full brother Scott, while Mair stayed with his grandmother. Reginald died in the 1980s. It is not known if Mair’s father, named locally as James, is still alive.

Speaking from his home in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, he added: ‘He’s never expressed any views about Britain, or politics or racist tendencies. I’m mixed race and I’m his half-brother, we got on well. He never married. The only time I remember him having a girlfriend was as a young man, but a mate stole her off him. He said that put him off [women] for life.’…

Read the entire article here.

The penalties of miscegenation

Patterns of Prejudice
Volume 6, Issue 3, 1972
pages 10-12
DOI: 10.1080/0031322X.1972.9969062

Mary Dines (1927-2011)

Paragraph 24 of “Commonwealth Citizens: Control after Entry: Immigration Rules” (Cmd. 4295) reads:

“If a man who was admitted as a visitor or student, or in some other temporary capacity, marries a woman who is a resident in the United Kingdom, he is not on that account to be granted an extension of stay or any other variation of conditions to enable him to settle here unless refusal would be undesirable because of the degree of hardship which, in the particular circumstances of the case, would be caused if the woman had to live outside the United Kingdom in order to be with her husband after marriage…”

These instructions are based on a rule announced by the Home Secretary in January 1969 as an “administrative procedure” and the principles involved were never submitted to Parliament in the form of a Clause or an amendment to a Bill. At the time, Mr. Callaghan stated that the intention was to put an end to the facility allowed to male fiancés to settle in the U.K. after marriage which then existed. This facility, he claimed, was being abused, particularly by Asians, as a means of seeking entry to the U.K. without an employment voucher. It is not proposed to go into the arguments about male fiancés at this stage and indeed experience has shown that this matter was used as a camouflage for the real motives behind the introduction of the new rules. A careful study of the wording confirms this and it should be noted that the Home Office say that the man marrying a resident here “is not on that account to be granted an extension of stay” (my italics).

In any discussion on racial prejudice in Britain the question of miscegenation is bound to arise. Even in colonial times the British showed a marked aversion to mixed marriages. Significantly the majority of those that did take place were between “other ranks” of occupying armies and local women in places like…

Read or purchase the article here.

What You Didn’t Know About Loving v. Virginia

TIME
2016-06-10

Arica L. Coleman

The landmark civil rights Supreme Court case—which made it illegal to ban interracial marriage—was about more than black and white

When the Supreme Court heard arguments in the case Loving v. the Commonwealth of Virginia, defendants Richard and Mildred Loving chose not to appear in person. In 1958, they had been convicted for the felony of miscegenation. As lawyers presented their arguments, 17 states remained steadfast in their refusal to repeal such laws banning interracial marriages. But, though he did not attend the arguments, Richard sent a message to the justices: “Tell the Court I love my wife and it is just not fair that I cannot live with her in Virginia.”

The justices unanimously agreed. On June 12, 1967, proscriptions against interracial marriage were declared unconstitutional.

In the years since, the couple’s victory has often been seen as a touchstone in the fight for black civil rights. The Lovings’ lawyer’s assertion before the court that anti-miscegenation statutes were “ the most odious of the segregation laws and the slavery laws” reinforced this assumption. As historian Peter Wallenstein aptly stated in his book Tell the Court I Love My Wife, “There was no doubt in anybody’s mind as to the racial identities, white and black, of the people who claimed to be Mr. and Mrs. Loving.”

But the Lovings’ public persona was more myth than reality. While researching my book That the Blood Stay Pure: African Americans, Native Americans and the Predicament of Race and Identity in Virginia, I spoke to Mildred Loving, who died in 2008. “I am not black,” she told me during a 2004 interview. “I have no black ancestry. I am Indian-Rappahannock. I told the people so when they came to arrest me.”…

Read the entire article here.

One man’s quest for Loving Day, a holiday for multiracial Americans

The Los Angeles Times
2016-06-10

Jaweed Kaleem

Ken Tanabe founded Loving Day in 2004, and leads celebrations and workshops across the U.S. on being multiracial. (Pearl Shavzin-Dremeaux)

Forty-nine years ago on June 12, the Supreme Court struck down laws in 16 states that banned mixed-race marriages. The decision in Loving vs. Virginia overturned the conviction of Richard and Mildred Loving, an interracial couple from Caroline County, Va., who had been arrested, jailed and banned from their home state for violating its Racial Integrity Act.

It also ushered in a new era in the American family.

Today, the Pew Research Center counts 22 million multiracial Americans, about 6.9% of the U.S. population. Nearly 10% of married couple households — more than 5 million — are interracial or inter-ethnic, according to the U.S. census.

For 12 years, Ken Tanabe, a Japanese-Belgian freelance graphic designer living in New York, has been working to educate Americans about what he sees as one of the most significant civil rights cases through Loving Day, the unofficial holiday that cities across the country are slowly adapting to celebrate the lives of the fast-growing multiracial population.

Now Tanabe, whose organization has tracked and sponsored many of the dozens of dance and music festivals, film screenings, picnics and forums taking place across the country in June to commemorate Loving vs. Virginia, has launched a campaign to get the holiday recognized by the federal government…

Read the entire article here.

National Women’s History Museum presents Chinese American Women: A History of Resilience and Resistance

National Women’s History Museum
2016-06-08

Joseph, Emily, Mamie, Frank, and Mary Tape.

Tape v. Hurley

Mary Tape was a biracial Chinese American woman who believed that her daughter, Mamie, should have the same access to education as white children in San Francisco. In particular, Mary Tape wanted her daughter to be able to attend public school. When the local school principal, Jennie Hurley, stood in the schoolhouse door to bar Mamie’s entrance on the sole grounds that she was Chinese, Mary Tape took Jennie Hurley to court.

In 1885, almost seventy years before the famous Supreme Court Decision Brown v. Board of Education desegregated American public schools, Mary Tape sued the San Francisco School District to offer public education to all Chinese children. Tape v. Hurley was one of the most important civil rights decisions in American history. In this ground breaking case, Superior Court Judge James Maguire ruled that Chinese children must have access to public education: “To deny a child, born of Chinese parents in this state, entrance to the public schools would be a violation of the law of the state and the Constitution of the United States.”…

Read the entire article here.

On Becoming Black, Becoming White and Being Human: Rachel Dolezal and the Fluidity of Race

Truthdig
2015-06-18

Channing G. Joseph

Library of Congress

For decades, no one knew my cousin Ernest Torregano was black. At least, no one who mattered in his new life.

Not the clients or associates of the prominent bankruptcy law firm with which he had built his reputation and his fortune. Not the other members of the San Francisco Planning Commission, of which he had been president. And certainly not the mayor, Elmer Robinson, with whom Ernest had been close since their days as fresh new lawyers in the city. It is quite likely, I think, that Ernest never admitted, even to Pearl, his second wife of 30 years, that she had married an African-American man.

Few understood the true extent of my cousin’s labyrinth of secrets until he was already dead and buried. By then, he had successfully “passed for white” for more than 40 years.

When his only child, Gladys Stevens, learned that her father had not died in 1915 but had been alive until 1954, she filed suit to claim her share of his estate—worth about $300,000 then, or about $2.6 million today. After a protracted legal battle to prove she really was Ernest’s daughter, she won. Meanwhile, her story—and Ernest’s—made national headlines for nearly seven years. One Oklahoma newspaper announced: “Widow Claims Rich Lawyer Was Really Her Negro Father.” A Connecticut paper proclaimed: “Daughter’s Suit Reveals Double Life of Man Who Passed Over Color Line.” But Newsweek magazine’s headline captured the essence of the story in just three words: “The Second Man.”

Born into a mixed-race family in New Orleans in 1882, the First Man was the fair-skinned son of a white father and a mixed-race mother. And because he so loved to sing and to laugh and to travel, he joined a touring minstrel troupe, performing in blackface makeup for cheering crowds across the South. In that show, he met Viola, who played the guitar, and they married. After their daughter, Gladys, was born, the First Man took a job as a Pullman porter on the Southern Pacific Railroad line from New Orleans to San Francisco—to make a better living for his new family. But at some point along the way—perhaps as he gazed through a train car window at the countryside rolling by or as he wandered along Market Street among white people who did not sneer at him or call him “boy”—he decided he would never return home. (According to one account, his mother, who supported the idea of his passing, convinced him that Viola and Gladys had been killed and that he should forget them forever.)…

Read the entire article here.

#myLovingDay: How the Lovings’ trials paved the way for today’s multiracial families

The Los Angeles Times
2016-06-03

Michelle Maltais

Mildred and Richard Loving, convicted in Virginia of marrying while interracial. (Associated Press)

I like to say that I am because of Loving. Mildred and Richard Loving.

In the early 1970s when my parents met, the only laws that really mattered in their relationship were the laws of attraction. But in 1958 when Mildred and Richard married, interracial marriage wasn’t just complicated, it was illegal. Since they couldn’t get married in their home state of Virginia (or 24 other states), they went to the District of Columbia and were wed on June 2, 1958…

…My own “Loving” story started in the early ’70s in Palm Desert, Calif. At that time, no one else in my neighborhood  —  or in my school —  looked like me. No one’s family looked like mine.

Was California in the early 1970s anything like the South of the ‘50s and ‘60s? Not at all…

Read the entire article here.

Obama signs measure striking ‘oriental’ and ‘negro’ from federal law

The Hill
2016-05-20

Jordan Fabian, White House Correspondent

President Obama has signed legislation striking outdated racial terms such as “Oriental” and “Negro” from federal laws.

Obama signed the bill without fanfare on Friday along with six other pieces of legislation, the White House said…

Read the entire article here.

Chris Harper Mercer’s “Mixed Race” Identity and the Umpqua Community College Shooting

Daily Kos
2015-10-02

Chauncey DeVega

It is a new/old day in America. On Thursday, there was another mass shooting. On Friday, today, and tomorrow, and in the week’s thereafter America’s politicians will do nothing to stop the plague of gun violence. This is a choice. It is cowardice. The weakness is caused by the grip exerted on America’s political elites by the ammosexuals and gun money barons in the National Rifle Association.

Chris Harper Mercer killed 10 people at Umpqua Community [College] in Oregon. Much will be written about what his murder spree reveals—none of it really new—about toxic aggrieved masculinity, gun culture, ammosexuals, the online Right-wing sewers that gave him aid and comfort, and other matters.

I would like to call attention to one detail about Mercer’s personhood, a detail that may be overlooked or not discussed by the mainstream news media out of fear of being called “racist”, or alternatively because they lack the conceptual tools (and will not feature experts who possess them) to talk about race and the color line in a nuanced way…

Read the entire article here.

Charleston Syllabus: Readings on Race, Racism, and Racial Violence

University of Georgia Press
May 2016
336 pages
Trim size: 6 x 9
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8203-4956-5
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8203-4957-2
Author Website

Edited by:

Chad Williams, Associate Professor of African & Afro-American Studies
Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts

Kidada E. Williams, Associate Professor of History
Wayne State University, Detroit, Michgan

Keisha N. Blain, Assistant Professor of History
University of Iowa

On June 17, 2015, a white supremacist entered Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and sat with some of its parishioners during a Wednesday night Bible study session. An hour later, he began expressing his hatred for African Americans, and soon after, he shot nine church members dead, the church’s pastor and South Carolina state senator, Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, among them. The ensuing manhunt for the shooter and investigation of his motives revealed his beliefs in white supremacy and reopened debates about racial conflict, southern identity, systemic racism, civil rights, and the African American church as an institution.

In the aftermath of the massacre, Professors Chad Williams, Kidada Williams, and Keisha N. Blain sought a way to put the murder—and the subsequent debates about it in the media—in the context of America’s tumultuous history of race relations and racial violence on a global scale. They created the Charleston Syllabus on June 19, starting it as a hashtag on Twitter linking to scholarly works on the myriad of issues related to the murder. The syllabus’s popularity exploded and is already being used as a key resource in discussions of the event.

Charleston Syllabus is a reader—a collection of new essays and columns published in the wake of the massacre, along with selected excerpts from key existing scholarly books and general-interest articles. The collection draws from a variety of disciplines—history, sociology, urban studies, law, critical race theory—and includes a selected and annotated bibliography for further reading, drawing from such texts as the Confederate constitution, South Carolina’s secession declaration, songs, poetry, slave narratives, and literacy texts. As timely as it is necessary, the book will be a valuable resource for understanding the roots of American systemic racism, white privilege, the uses and abuses of the Confederate flag and its ideals, the black church as a foundation for civil rights activity and state violence against such activity, and critical whiteness studies.